Sweat
Donmar Warehouse, London

SOME years ago Lynn Nottage spent time embedded with blue-collar workers in the Pennsylvania town of Reading, gathering their thoughts and tapping into their experiences as she sought raw material for this play.

But Sweat — uncompromising and frequently disquieting — is not some kind of earnest social history. Instead, directed by Lynette Linton, it’s a tension-filled drama with a turbulent, consuming plot and a cast of highly engaging characters who demand attention from the off.

Although the overarching framework of Frankie Bradshaw’s brooding set — all rusting girders, old pipes and mildewed brick walls —  is rooted in industrial decline, most of the action takes place in the cosier surrounds of Mick’s Tavern, with a TV in the corner broadcasting news of impending economic doom under the presidency of George W Bush.

Barman Stan, played with bear-like gentleness by Stuart MacQuarrie, attends to, and mediates with, a band of hard-drinking regulars whose bond of friendship is the local steel-tube factory in which they’ve spent their entire working lives.

As rumours of lay-offs, pay cuts and lockouts become reality, fragile collective and individual equilibriums are upset beyond repair and, via flashbacks and fast-forwards, we come to understand a series of events that lead two of the younger protagonists into deep trouble and most of the others into some very bad places indeed.

Nottage invests her characters with a wealth of admirable qualities but also with a host of faults and foibles that are aggravated by various levels of substance abuse and exacerbated by the dislocation generated by economic retrenchment.

Each is a beguiling patchwork of toughness and vulnerability, humility and hubris, defencelessness and defiance, all stitched together with fine threads of humour.

It would be difficult to imagine a better set of players to take on the difficult task of portraying such complex individuals. In particular, Martha Plimpton is magnificent as Tracey, whether in her early stages of rollicking rebellion or in her later opioid-wracked brokenness, while Clare Perkins as her feisty friend and foil Cynthia manages to maintain our sympathy even as she switches from shop floor to managerial office, finding herself hopelessly compromised when the redundancy notices hit the fan.

The show’s publicity makes much of the racial tensions in the storyline yet they are just one element of a nuanced portrayal of how solidarity, empathy and friendship so quickly become unstuck in the face of economic stress, how wholesome pride can feed into unthinking prejudice and of how a natural human tendency for internecine strife is so often the downfall of working people when the chips are down.

Unseen on stage — as largely in life — are those in power whose interests are best served by the chaos that ensues when the rest of us are sent fighting for scraps. All of the play’s sympathy goes to the latter while most of its anger is directed at the former.

Runs until February 2, box office: donmarwarehouse.com.